ESTONIAN ART AUCTION - MID-19TH CENTURY TO 1965

ON A TIMELINE

Foreword: Piia Ausman, Curator of the Auction

Author of the catalogue texts: Eero Epner, Art Historian

The 2023 spring auction organised by Haus Gallery presents art on a timeline. It is important for us to offer systematic and thematically curated selections of works to both auction participants and art lovers. Each auction leaves an art-historical trail, mapping out for the public works that have until now been in private collections, and in some cases completely undiscovered, complementing and illustrating the creative history of many artists. Each of Haus Gallery’s current and subsequent auction exhibitions is not just an event focused on buying and selling works, but aspires to be a biannual small survey exhibition, bringing together a comparative picture of our art’s past, development, experiments, and present.

This year’s auction exhibition will present works throughout Estonian art history, grouped by decade. This catalogue covers the period from the mid-19th century to 1965. It was the 1960s that were the most tumultuous in our art, when both old and new artists visibly mixed. An era when the Pallas artists, who made their mark in the first half of the 20th century, painted alongside the young names who had just emerged on the art scene and who have now become classics of our modern art. So, in this decade, we can see side by side the new world vision of the ANK '64 group and landscapes created in the key of classical modernism, as well as the modern experimental expressions of experienced artists.

Curated in this way, the exhibition certainly creates a truer reflection of reality, showing both the differences and similarities in artistic pursuits at the time, revealing the divisions and commonalities between the eras and the inherent intertwining.

Although, when placed in a logical sequence, the selection of works in Haus Gallery’s art auctions can still be characterised as an overlapping of curated coincidences, a process that is fascinating in its mystery. In most cases, it is impossible for us to plan in advance the works that will be auctioned, as they come from private collections, especially in the case of early art, and the decisions to sell them are often taken outside our control. You could say that the works are finding us and we are looking for the best ways to showcase them. These coincidences are all the more inspiring. Each selection of art assembled at the moment of the auction has its own individual undertone, setting the challenge each time of how to present the selection and how to combine the works together to tell a thoughtful, holistic story of our art history.

The trace of each auction is an art-historical document – a printed catalogue, a video image, an internet record. The way we present our art in the context of an auction, or more broadly, cannot simply be a series of pictures stitched together for sale, but a responsibility to manage our intellectual heritage with dignity. We also need to think about the educational aspect, about how the art information presented through auctions contributes to our artistic awareness and knowledge in the long term.

In this year’s Haus Gallery auction catalogue, you will find chapters by decade that talk about the important and characteristic features of a given period of time, and go on to describe the role of each author in that period, through the work they are auctioning.

This catalogue begins with Johann Köler’s exceptionally masterful and inspiring arrangement of the head of Jesus from the period 1857–1858, pauses in the 1910s through Konrad Mägi’s outstandingly colour-intensive landscape, looks at Nikolai Kull through his painterly self-portrait from the 1920s, takes a look at Johannes Võerahansu’s touching view of the early spring landscape on the eve of war in 1941, or perceives Johannes Greenberg’s profoundly psychological figure compositions from the same place, touches on the repressed and restrained 1950s, when landscapes but also flowers dominated, and concludes with works from the 1960s, when the young Valdur Ohakas painted a vigorous and experimental courtyard in Tallinn’s Old Town, and Elmar Kits a domestic greenhouse with an old woman who exudes the serene wisdom of being in action…

Our art is eloquent and inherently rich. Now that the selections for the art auctions have been compiled once again, let us take some time together to delve into the art as a whole, as well as the meaningful reflections of each individual work.